The tribe has been struggling.

A run in with the Temple of Fire has cost them their best warriors and mages, and there are mutterings about migrating south and abandoning the White. Yes, the marshes of the Grey are more dangerous, but it's warmer and food will be easier to find.

They have a child with them. One of the dead mages had a daughter, and none of them know which if any of them is her father. She isn't a very interesting child, quiet and with seemingly little interest in anything going on, but she's inherited several supernatural traits from her mage mother and is extremely hardy. That means she's likely to survive the journey, despite her age.

They go slow, fortifying their camp each evening, fending off wolf attacks and giant-worm ambushes, sometimes several nights in a row. They don't want to lose anyone else.

It takes them years, and several false stops, before the find a secure enough corner of less-terrible marshland where their camp can dig in and become a village, but eventually they do. A month without moving on turns into a year, turns into several years. It is a harsh life, but it's theirs.

It is obvious as soon as she hits puberty that Kamryn is going to be the most attractive female entity anyone in the tribe has ever seen. Her mother was the most beautiful woman in the entire territory and it's looking like her daughter will surpass her at half her age.

Her beauty is like a piece of priceless artwork, and the tribesmen dote on her, hoping to protect it. Nevermind that she's harder to damage than even the biggest of the tribes warriors, and so tireless that she can work all day without sweating and keep watch all night without dozing. It starts to chafe, a little, that they treat her like this fragile treasure when she's the least fragile thing in the entire village.

It is also obvious, at least to Kamryn herself, that the reason she never cared about anything before was because she was missing the most important piece of being alive. Everything is colored in a perception she never had before, and its like waking up for real for the first time in her life. Expecting her to keep acting like a half-alive child instead of her awakened self is entirely foolish. Now that she understands sex, everything else makes sense too.

Mostly.

Sometimes the tribesmen look at her like they want to fuck her. She can feel the desire radiating from them like heat. The first few times this happens, she isn't sure of her own senses, so she asks them if she's right. They tell her no. They tell her she's wrong. But they're lying. It's so obvious they're lying.

"We'll find you a strong lad your own age, you just have to be patient," they say, and Kamryn points out that they're alone out here, there's no other tribes to look through.

"You have to think about your value to the tribe," they say, and Kamryn can't even articulate how little the one thing has to do with the other, in her mind.

"It's not how we do things," they say, and Kamryn wants to know if there's a reason.

The adults of her tribe deflect, deny, and ignore her arguments. It goes on for years, and it makes her furious, when she lets herself dwell on it. There's nowhere for that fury to go, though, so she distracts herself. She avoids the issue.

She starts avoiding the village all together.

They try to stop her, of course. They try to tell her it isn't safe. She says she knows that. She isn't an idiot. And she isn't a fragile treasure either. When one of the tribe's warriors bars her way, she challenges him to a fight. He refuses, so she attacks anyway. He's three times her size, stronger, and experienced.

It doesn't matter.

He gets tired. She doesn't.

Her bruises and scrapes heal faster than he can inflict them. His don't.

In the end, he is a broken and battered lump laying on the ground and wheezing like he's about to die.

Kamryn stands over him, not even ruffled.

"I'll be back in a few days," she says to their audience.

And with that, she strides out of the village before anyone else can try to stop her.

The Grey is a dangerous place, even sticking to the dryer paths.

Kamryn is barely out of sight of the village when a giant crawfish lunges up out of the bog and tries to grab her.

Kamryn feels it coming, a heat pressure almost like...

No time to contemplate. She dodges, and the crawfish goes stumbling by. She twists, spots the weak point in its upper body, and wraps her arms around it from behind, the hard chitin digging into her skin but unable to hurt her. She crushes it against her, pinning it where it can't reach her with its limbs.

The heat pressure vanishes as the crawfish starts flailing around, frantically trying to remove the squishy constricting thing on its back. It rolls. It slams Kamryn into the ground, into rocks, into a bit of driftwood. It tries to drown her.

Of course, none of that deters Kamryn one bit. Eventually it's struggles slow, it's chitin cracking more and more under the unrelenting strain. And it dies, at the bottom of the bog.

Kamryn crawls out of the water and grimaces.

Her wolfpelts are soaking wet and all muddy.

Well, there's no one around to give her looks or tell her to cover up if she takes them off. So she takes them off. She strips nude and sets her pelts out on a bit of dry ground. The feel of the air on her skin is freeing, and a relief, like a weight has been lifted off of her.

She's close enough to the village that if she just leaves her pelts behind, someone will probably find them tomorrow. It's more tempting than it should be. So tempting that she's considering actually doing it. After all, what exactly would she need her pelts for, if she's alone out in the marsh? It's not like they do anything to protect her. Her bare skin is enough to keep her warm and safe.

As she stands there nude, her mind goes back to the sense of warning she got, right before the crawfish tried to pounce. It hadn't felt like a warning. It had, now that Kamryn has time to examine the memory, felt like the radiance, the feeling she got when one of the tribesmen wanted to fuck her and refused to fucking admit it.

Kamryn freezes in place, a massive suspicion surging into existence within her.

She decides to test her theory, immediately.

She picks a direction and starts walking, paying close attention to her extra sense as she goes. Her pelts remain abandoned on the ground, forgotten.

There's some kind of plant over there with fat leaves, about knee-high and roundish. When she gets close enough, she can feel a flare up of the radiance. The desire.

When she gets even closer, the fat leaves flower open, and a trio of thick purple vines, shiny and slick, lash out at her.

Kamryn forces herself to not dodge.

Her suspicion has only grown.

She holds still and lets the slimy purple vines reach her.

The vines slap against her limbs and curl around to grab her!

They squeeze firmly but not enough to hurt, and they pull her closer. She could probably overpower them and get away if she really tried, but since she isn't trying they bring her to within arm's reach of the fat flower thing, where the vines have more slack to employ in wrapping around her body and rubbing all over her.

One vine finishes looping around her leg and then goes straight for Kamryn's crotch. It finds the center of her hot, slippery hole and plunges in, pumping in and out of her depths with enthusiasm.

She fucking knew it!

Also, ohhhhhh fuck that feels good. It's better than she imagined and it isn't even a real cock.

She lays down next to the molester plant, giving it's thick purple vines even more slack to slither around her and slip and slide over her body.

It fucks her enthusiastically for a while, then shivers as its thick purple vines pulsate and spew a viscous and gooey fluid out of their tips, one of which is pressed up against the entrance to Kamryn's womb.

They pump out their seed-goo for several more minutes, before slithering off of Kamryn's body and slurping back into the fat leafy plant.

In the instant the goo touches her womb, it's like she's grasping something with a hand she didn't know she had. Only its so much more than a feeling. She can sense the potential in the goo, instinctive knowledge that she innately understands.

She can reject the goo, and it will do nothing. Or she can embrace it, contribute a bit of herself in turn, and spark the creation of a new life. Instinctive knowledge about what that life would be like fills her mind: two days to become a baby version of the molester plant that fucked her, an acorn almost, though softer and bigger. Rich in nutrients too.

Hm.

When she returns to her tribe a few days later, she's carrying a handwoven basket full of squishy purple acorns.

She entirely forgets she's nude until she sees the tribesmen's reaction. She counts, and more of them demand to know where her clothes are than tell her they're relieved she's returned unharmed. Kamryn could choose to take this as a complement about her toughness, but they don't mean it that way, she can tell.

She remembers where she left her wolfpelts. Maybe she can find them and wash them. She hands off the handbasket and heads back out to where the crawfish attacked her.

The woman who takes the basket is the one who does most of the cooking, and she looks delighted at the rare and novel... fruit? Really, they look like eggs that came from a plant but that's silly, right?

One lone tribeswoman, stares at the basket and then at Kamryn, in horror. When another asks her what's wrong, she shakes her head and stays tight-lipped.

Out in the bog, Kamryn's muddy wolfpelts are, in fact, still right where she left them.

The pelts are not, however, alone.

What looks like a sleek bush with eyes is sniffing around the wolfpelts, poking them with its vine-tentacles. It's difficult to judge its size, but its leafy body comes up to about Kamryn's thigh.

It perks up, its eyes swiveling around as Kamryn approaches. It shrinks back a little, pulling its vine-tentacles in close to its body in caution as it eyes her nude body.

It starts radiating a soft, muted desire, watching her as it slithers sideways.

Is that a leaf octopus? That's what it looks like.

This is the first time Kamryn has seen one up close, but they're really common, so she recognizes the species. Usually they avoid conflict and keep to themselves, and judging by how skittish its acting, this one is no different. She's seen the little enclaves leaf octopi build, from a distance, sometimes. She wonders if they can talk. It's not like her tribe would've tried to find out.

She can feel that it is looking at her and feeling sexual desire for her. She trusts her extra sense about that now. And nothing she met out in the marshes, that radiated desire like that, tried to hurt her if she let it have its way with her. Her tribe wanted her to think otherwise, but she knew better now.

She lowers herself to her hands and knees, making herself smaller than the skittish leaf octopus, and crawls toward it as she meets its gaze. It looks confused, she thinks, but it doesn't flee. She slowly crawls right up to it and sits on her heels, slowly reaching out a hand.

Two of the creature's vine-tentacles reach back tentatively, setting the tip of one on her palm while the other loops hesitantly around her forearm.

It calms down quickly, when nothing bad happens, and there's almost a readable expression of happiness in its big shiny eyes.

It glances down at Kamryn's exposed breasts and crotch. It tentatively extends a few more of its vine-tentacles toward her hips and chest, seeking to caress her skin.

Come on leafy guy, Kamryn would love to have sex some more.

She spreads her legs and guides one of the vine-tentacles into her, and senses the desire from the leaf octopus surge.

She smiles. He's... there's a lot more him there, than with the molester plants. Getting fucked by a molester plant's vines, it didn't feel like she was having sex with anyone. Here, this guy is present, and experiencing his side of things. There's a being behind those eyes.

Kamryn smiles, and runs her hands over her new leafy friend as it plunges its vine-tentacles into her holes and pleasures her with forethought and intent.

This is Kamryn's life, for the next few years, as she settles into a routine.

She returns to her village one night a week, to sleep for a few hours, before venturing back out again. She finds that she can't stand to wear her wolfpelts for more than a few hours at a time anyway, now that she's used to roaming the marshes in the nude. She always brings a gift. Molester acorns, or a crawfish corpse, most commonly. One time she brings back a sword that she finds on a rotting corpse that somehow gets up and tries to kill her despite being long dead.

Every time she goes out, her leaf octopus friend is there to join her. She names him Vinely, which he seems to approve of. They work out their own private language of gestures and sounds. It's crude, not the sort of thing that allows a real conversation, but it's enough to feel like she has a peer. Vinely was by no means a "strong lad her own age" but Kamryn could not care less what her tribe would think. She and Vinely have sex every day, and she protects him when something dangerous comes along.

For now, this life is all Kamryn knows.

A large, fleshy maw bursts up out of the bog, scattering mud and detritus for hundreds of feet around.

It splits into fours, curling outward into thick, fleshy petals. The petals slam back into the marshland, digging in to hold the maw in place. Then, it's throat opens, revealing a long, slanted tunnel of moist flesh.

A trio of betentacled feminine heads peek out, and look around.

They're in a crag between a pair of ossified trees and sinkhole of deeper water.

Marshland surrounds them. But over that way, there is a small plume of smoke.

And right here, there is a big tubular beast lurching out of the swamp, it's round maw sprouting dozens of tentacles that shoot out and ensnare of the the emerging seducers. It sucks the seducer into its mouth, wrapping her in tentacles oozing a paralytic aphrodisiac.

It looks like a fleshworm, only squat, stubby, and uglier, with tentacles of an odd aqua green shade. Dumber too, from the feel of its slurred mind. But, while it isn't proper kin to the Tentacled, it is familiar. A demitentacled creature they can relate to.

"Stop making noise," the tentacle princess with an excessive number of eyes commands, and the shambling anemone sluggishly obeys, settling down to fuck its captive seducer.

One of the non-captured seducers makes an inquisitive chirrup, and the seducer getting violently stuffed full of green paralytic tentacles purrs a pleasantly-surprised and see-where-this-goes reply.

"There's a village over there," the tentacle princess with tail-pussy tentacles for hair points out.

"Should we make contact?" asks the overly-endowed-with-eyeballs tentacle princess.

"They're not Lovers. They might be hostile," the third tentacle princess, with the leaking mega-boobs and dozen tentacle-girldicks, says.

Talance, still shrunken to a small blob of flesh, pipes up. "I can take a local form and scout for you!"

"...can you take a local form, darling?" the tail-pussy-hair princess challenges gently.

Talance wriggles with gonna-try. The blob that is her roils as she rearranges her flesh, forming into a shape with four limbs and a head. Then joints. Then a face. ...a face. C'mon, face. Bones? No bones either? Drat.

Talance droops. "I can't yet."

"I thought not."

One of Tail-Pussy-Head's head-tails snakes out and latches on to one of Mega-Milk's cocks to suck an orgasm out of the other princess. Mega-Milk's cum always helps her think.

"We need allies, at the least to tell us where we are. We're lucky we even emerged so close to a settlement."

Mega-Milk catches the head-tail as it detaches and stuffs one of her other cocks into it, frowning. "Should we really ask for help from literally the first outlanders we meet?"

"We don't really have a choice," Eyeball-Endowment added. "The outlands aren't like homeflesh. Even if nothing opposes us, a naive journey could leave us starved or worse before we ever begin mustering forces to our cause."

"Hng," Mega-Milk cums repeatedly into Tail-Pussy-Head's head-tail, then turns, one of her massive nipples bulging open as a tentacle pokes out and then shoves itself in Eyeball-Endowment's mouth. "Here, look at this."

Eyeball-Endowment suckles on the milktacle while following Mega-Milk's psychic impression. Her powerful vision clarifies the suspicious dot that Mega-Milk is worried about.

It is actually four dots.

Or more accurately, four big grey fluffy quadrupeds each with a maw full of pointy bones.

The wolf pack had been passing around the twoleg's den, but now they've caught an entirely new scent and they MUST GO AND AGGRESSIVELY GROWL AT IT IMMEDIATELY.

The village is to the west. The wolf pack to the south.

Mega-Milk starts to suggest retreating into the flesh tunnel and closing it off, when Eyeball-Endowment gestures toward the approaching wolves and twists her mana into a braid, lighting up the [Attack], [Seek], [Channel], [Glow] and [Charge] runenodes within herself.

A ball of violent mana forms at the tip of one of her grabber-tentacles, humming with violence as she wrestles it into shape. As soon as it is cooperating, she lights up [Projectile].

The ball of mana blasts away from her, screaming through the air toward the wolves, a thread of glowing mana trailing behind itself, a thread maintaining a connection back to Eyeball-Endowment. With barks of alarm the wolves scatter. It doesn't matter. With a twist of will, the hurtling ball of violent mana splits into four, four strings trailing back, controlling each as they home in on of the wolves.

Four brief but agonized yips precede four explosions of mud, bog-water, and wolf-flesh.

Mega-Milk and Tail-Pussy-Head hold still all of their tentacles in protest.

"That was not necessary, Eydow!" Tail-Pussy-Head objects.

"You don't know that, Taud."

Mega-Milk squishes her breasts together in worry. "That settlement surely knows we're here, now."

"Are they dead?" Talance (or rather, Tentacle-Balance) asks in a soft psychic whisper.

Tail-Pussy-Head wraps one of her motive-skirt nub-tentacles around the little fleshball in comfort, and Talance clings, growing a crude set of hips with a couple of vulvas to grind against the slick, wiggling nubs.

"Well. Let's go talk to the settlement. Hopefully they aren't fond of furry-teeth-canids."

Kamryn isn't in the village, but she's hanging out nearby waiting for Vinely to get back from visiting his family, when she feels it.

It's spectacular.

If the tribesmen are like a bonfire, and Vinely is like a hot bath, this, this radiance shines like the sun. It is a vast, fathomless, omnipresent blaze that bathes the world in its light... while being still and calm and steadier than the staidest mountain.

Kamryn darts through the marsh, circumnavigating the village toward where she can feel the unquenchable radiance.

The tribe has a few of its own mages, but none of them can do anything like that.

The warriors scramble to arm themselves and organize, alarmed by the blatant display of high-level magic on their doorstep.

As the first of them hurry out of the village, they're briefly distracted by the sight of Kamryn's naked backside, jogging away from them. Then one of them spots the terrifying (and uncomfortably sensual) mass of entwined slimy flesh on an intercept course, and shouts a warning.

A human! They didn't have a chance to bring any with them but human Lovers are common enough. It is a reassuring and relieving sight.

The numerous furry figures with sharp metal things on sticks behind the human are not reassuring. Eyeball-Endowment starts to entwine her mana in preparation for another attack spell, only for Tail-Pussy-Head to restrain her.

"Wait, I think those are humans too!"

A large number of eyes blink. "Oh. So they are. That's so weird. Why are they so, gnarled. And hairy?"

Mega-Milk's shrug sends ripples through the retinue.

Kamryn has never seen anything like this before. She's, of course, noticed the common theme among almost everything that feels lust out in the marsh: the sinuous form of long, slithery, slippery appendages that are good for finding and filling a body's holes. This is that, but purified. Exemplified.

It's beautiful.

The three creatures in the lead look like they have humanoid shapes, with faces and torsos and limbs arranged symmetrically on either side, though the limbs themselves vary widely from mere arms and legs. There's one with a skirt of thick nubbed tentacles holding her up, and a bunch of thick tubed tentacles with fleshy mouths on the ends growing from her head, but normal humanoid arms. There's one with normal humanoid legs but eyes where her vulva, bellybutton, breasts, and shoulders should be, with a variety of thick dexterous tentacles, including more eyes, growing like lids or lashes around the shoulder-eyes instead of arms, but with a vulva peeking out between the base of each one. The face is almost normal, framed by actual hair. The last is plump and curvy, with impossibly enormous breasts, a tentacle sprouting from each nipple, and a bunch more in phallic form from her crotch area, which was split into three pairs of hips meeting at the butt, and six thigh-thick tentacles with grabby ends in place of legs.

They're all tangled together, various tentacles looped around or slithering over flesh here and there, none of them untouched by another, but most of the tentacles are long and nimble enough that they don't need to move in lockstep to remain in contact. Behind the three humanoids come a few dozen more stranger beings: simple balls of tentacles, as well as a few scattered unique things, and, more humanoids... at least from the neck down, with shiny purplish skin and spectacularly buxom figures, but with round flesh-flower mouths as big as heads, in the place of heads.

"Hello!" Kamryn calls. "My name is Kamryn and this is our tribe's village. Who are you and where have you come from?"

The human makes a complicated series of vocal sounds, far too quickly to interpret the emotion behind most of them, and the only meaning that comes through is a low murmur of fuck-me-fuck-me-you-should-fuck-me.

Humans are always saying that. Even the gnarled dirty ones brandishing pointy metal are whispering it. But this human is almost certainly trying to communicate something else in addition to that.

Tail-Pussy-Head takes the initiative, as she is wont to do. She thinks hard, and tries to repeat the one verbal-word she did catch. Humans verbalizing their own names or the names of others is a concept she's familiar with. "Kam... ryn?"

It doesn't occur to her, though, that just because the human is saying something besides you-should-fuck-me that she shouldn't provide the poor neglected creature with some stimulation. So, as she slithers forward, a pair of her head-tails reach out and open up, seeking to latch on and suckle the human's breasts as an opening greeting.

Kamryn isn't sure what's happening here. She doesn't think they actually understood her question. But she trusts her extra sense and her breasts are already tingling with anticipatory pleasure at the sight of those slick, slimy orifices reaching out to suckle her. She steps closer, making herself easier to reach-

One of the tribeswoman mages knows Kamryn's secret. She's kept it to herself all this time, afraid that a confrontation would drive Kamryn away entirely. She couldn't hide her horror the first time she saw Kamryn bring home food for the tribe, food birthed from Kamryn's own body, result and proof that the girl had been caught and raped by at least one of the monstrous pod-plants that covered the Grey and violated anyone who got close enough.

Kamryn had always been touched in the head, she knows. It was obvious, those dead eyes staring placidly out of a beautiful child's face. There's something deeply wrong with the girl, something that makes her incapable or unwilling to protect herself. Why. Every time, she comes back with more rapespawn to give to the cooks. It never stops. It never gets less frequent. Kamryn never learns better. She just keeps venturing out and getting raped no matter what anyone says to her.

The girl could not. Would not. Refused to, protect herself.

And now the girl is practically throwing herself into the clutches of a horde of disgusting Tentacled abominations.

It's too much. Too far. If the girl refuses to protect herself, then she'll have to do it for her. "Get away from her!!! Banchirr talmello!"

It's her most powerful combat spell. A deadly jet of fine sand, a continuous blast that she could maintain until her target was dead. She aims it at the abomination's head, before it can get its slimy tentacles on Kamryn.

Eyeball-Endowment has a shimmering shield up in an instant, but-

With a snarl of frustration, Kamryn throws herself in front of the spell, braces, gets her arms up to protect her face.

She doesn't scream in pain, but it's a close thing, as the sand rips the flesh from her arms and sprays blood and mulched flesh all over the Tentacled's shield spell. The force of it pushes her back, her feet sliding on the wet ground, her regeneration unable to keep up with the rate that flesh is being torn from her arms. Her bones hold up, though, meaning she won't have to regrow her hands.

Then it stops.

Kamryn slowly lowers her arms, hissing at the feel of her regeneration dislodging so much sand as flesh spreads down her arms, restoring her to pristine condition.

The look of horror the tribe's Earth Mage is giving her is surprisingly similar to the look she gave Kamryn all those years ago.

"What just happened?!"

"I think one of them tried to kill us and the Lover defended us?"

"Forget it. We're retreating. We'll fortify the maw and come up with some other approach."

"What about the Lover?!"

"We can't afford to lose anyone in a conflict! We'll figure out what to do once we're not under threat!"

The retinue and the princesses pull back, departing the human village.

An argument ensues as soon as the Tentacled are gone.

Unusually, it's Kamryn who starts it. "What is wrong with you?! Why did you attack them?!"

     "Me?!?! I can't believe you'd defend those things! Do you have any idea what they were going to do to you?! You fucking well should by now!!!"

"They were friendly before you started blasting!"

     "You are a deluded, broken child and I'm not going to stand by and watch you get violated!"

"Then look away," Kamryn snarls in pure rage, angrier than she's ever been in her life as the Earth Mage's motivations begin to make sense. "You've all been lying to me my entire life! You're the deluded one here. ALL OF YOU ARE! But I could always see the truth you wanted to hide from me."

     "What truth?!?!"

Kamryn's voice is ice cold. "That in this story, you are the villains. And the creatures that just want to mate with us, are the innocents."

It feels like the entire tribe tries to shout a response to this at once, the babble of outraged voices rising over each other at the revelation that their precious-if-distant tribesdaughter has not only been violated by various tentacled creatures out in the marsh during her long absences, but that she has been going back for more on purpose. That she prefers the company of monsters to the company of her tribe.

At least they're too busy yelling to complain about her nudity.

And on that note, Kamryn wonders. More than once, instead of ranging about in the marsh, Kamryn has simply gone home with Vinely and spent a week living among his bushel of leaf octopi. It didn't really feel that different than roaming the marsh in terms of amenities, so she's never really considered it an alternative to her village, but the thought has crossed her mind.

But now, they've, for-real, made contact with another tribe. Yes, the other tribe is Tentacled and alien, but... they have magic and purpose and... and presented with a choice that she's never had before, between two very different groups of people...

Kamryn isn't even listening to the yelling, now, and some of it's even turned against itself, arguments between other tribemembers about what to do. She can feel the last of her tenuous connection to these people dissolving in the face of literally any alternative. She's not, and has never been, theirs.

She turns, and leaves, and the tribe is too accustomed to seeing her naked backside vanish into the marsh to think that this time might be different, until it's too late.

When the nude human approaches the edge of their camp, Mega-Milk is in the midst of fleshcrafting some bone-reinforced walls as precaution against hostilities. A seducer chirps out a warning, and one of the Orbs floats over to grab the human and make sure she doesn't go anywhere.

It plunges a tentacle into each of her holes, because they're right there and wet and inviting, and if it is going to hold on to her anyway...

It doesn't expect the human to object, mostly because it is only familiar with the sorts of humans who do not, in fact, object, but also because, like all humans it has met, this one is murmuring a continuous silent stream of you-should-fuck-me.

Kamryn would be an idiot if she expected any different.

As the thick, slick, phallic tentacles plunge into her pussy, up her ass, and down her throat, she welcomes them eagerly. It's not an unfamiliar experience of course. If anything, this is better. These capital-T Tentacles are just... the experience of being fucked, perfected and refined. Warm and thick and slick and perfectly shaped to be as appealing as possible. And the way they move. It's like they know every secret of her flesh, rubbing against her insides in just the right way to milk as much pleasure from her body as possible, without any impression that this requires effort on the part of the tentacle orb.

As welcomes go, Kamryn has no complaints about this one, and if anything how'd it'd scandalize her tribe is a bonus, at this point. She settles in to wait, and get driven to orgasm over and over, while the Tentacled people finish raising their defensive walls and stuff.

It's nice to have this particular wild human confirmed as sane non-hostile.

She's more than just that, it turns out.

As the days pass, Kamryn works out what's going on with the Tentacled's psychic communication much faster than even she expects, and is able to meet the tentacle princesses halfway before the week is out.

For the Tentacled, their verbal language is almost entirely tonal. It's a proxy for emotion, first and foremost, and once Kamryn figures that out she can start conveying nuance that her psychic presence is unable to. From there, it's a short time before she can start teaching the tentacle princesses the lexical meanings of various words, and learning the few scattered pseudo-lexical meanings that have crept into the emotion-tone language over time.

All three tentacled princess are kind of impressed with this human. They'd already known about lexical-verbal-language, of course, but most humans, even the the ones who've been Lovers for decades or centuries, well, the three of them have never met someone who teaches it so well.

There's no such thing as formal Lover status, but it doesn't take long before Kamryn is considered one of their own. She even helps repel the one attempt by her former tribe to take Kamryn back.

The tentacle tribe, despite being sheltered and ignorant of the larger world in their own way, knows so much more than Kamryn does about what's out there. Once the communication barrier is down, they have stories, and Kamryn wants to hear them all. Vinely swings by to visit on occasion, and Kamryn is apologetic that she has less time for her leafy friend now, but as a demitentacled sapient, Vinely is welcomed by the tribe of exiles.

Sometimes one of her new Tentacled family will forget that lexical language requires a clear mouth, and stuff a tentacle down Kamryn's throat when she's trying to say something... but she doesn't hold it against them, especially since they just as often make the same mistake when they are trying to say something lexical and accidentally interrupt themselves. Very amusing when it happens, it makes Kamryn giggle.

Kamryn is fascinated by how much more to magic there is than throwing blasts at things and purifying water. Eydow is their specialist in that, while Taud and Megk are more proficient in the traditional (for Tentacleds) fleshcrafting practices. The entire concept of biology is a fantastic new world for Kamryn that she explores ravenously.

Talance is the one to suggest it. Kamryn could become a spellcaster herself. Her soul is robust and powerful. Taud or Megk could install a Runenode formation, no problem. Kamryn eagerly asks for this. Talance is happy she helped!

In addition to the rune core, Kamryn asks, after talking it over with all three princesses, for [Utility], [Protect], [Construct], [Sex], [Blood], and [Flesh]. Her reasoning is that she wants to be able to share her toughness, and defensive magic is the next best thing. Utility and Sex are obvious and need no explanation, that's just quality of life and common sense; it's honestly weird that those are separate Runenodes, Megk opines. Blood and Flesh are also pretty obvious: after hearing so much about it, Kamryn really really wants to become a fleshcrafter. Maybe her old tribe wouldn't have treated her the way they did, if she could've made them all as pretty as she was.

Kamryn is deposited in an enclosed tentacle pit to help keep her stable during the installation, and Taud tells her to relax as Kamryn gently drifts to sleep in its fleshy embrace.

With a cooperative (for a generous definition of "cooperative" granted, but Kamryn is emphatically within the much less generous definitions) human, it becomes possible for the Tentacled exiles to start repopulating a bit. Not a lot. Just a bit to fill out their ranks without becoming unwieldy for just three tentacle princesses to manage.

When they explain the concept, Kamryn balks hard at bearing the tentacle princesses a daughter. And not for any of the reasons less cooperative humans might have, either. It isn't until they explain that princesses are human-adjacent enough to have a period of childhood where they're pre-sexual, that Kamryn's emotions rebel. Loving and caring for something she's not on and can't be on sexual terms with? She just... she just can't.

That's fine, the tentacle princesses reassure her. If the tentacle princesses really want a daughter, they can breed with each other, though that takes a lot out of them and requires a lot of fleshcrafting to make viable. That's what makes princesses unique, though.

No, they just want to expand the retinue, which can't be done without a human, and should be fine since pits, gazers, orbs, worms, seducers, and the like, don't have childhoods. They're born with comprehensive instincts and fully operative sexualities, and then develop personalities over time.

Yeah, Kamryn is perfectly fine with that. Don't scare her like that.

Of course, the only reason they even asked in the first place is because Kamryn has total control of her own fertility, which they only noticed after trying to impregnate her with a couple of tentacle orbs without asking first. Kamryn is fine with that too, she decides. It's not like any of the Grey's local demitentacled ever asked first either, and giving birth to various things that she does not have to then raise from a position of non-sexual emotional attachment is just another part of sex, for her, and often a fun part.

When Kamryn learns about crest tattoos, she even asks for one that'll make her better and faster at gestating and birthing Tentacleds. Eydow helpfully applies one, combining it with another she knows about that should help protect her mind and sexuality from anything trying to warp it. It flares up in pink light on her pubis mons, active constantly as she is almost never without a tentacle on or in her somewhere, and every Tentacled touch causes the tattoo to glow and amplify her pleasure. It makes her twice as fast at gestating new Tentacled, and every time she gives birth it flares up with a brilliant pink light as it takes her pleasure and wrenches it up to where she has constant mind-shattering orgasms through the whole process.

As she learns more Fleshcrafting, Talance volunteers to let Kamryn practice on her. It's helpful for both of them, with Talance able to undo any mistakes and let Kamryn start over at will, and with Kamryn able to shape Talance's flesh into forms she hasn't quite learned yet, accelerating the little flesh blob's growth into a proper changeling. With so much practice, Kamryn gets very good at it, even for her base learning speed, which is high.

Kamryn starts applying mutations to herself, anything that strikes her fancy.

She turns her tongue into a much longer prehensile tongue, to start. She makes her body more receptive to sexual fluids. She discovers how to give her own vagina a poor imitation of the innate healing effect Tentacled fluids have, though this has a side effect of making her extra aware of the emptiness of not having anything stuffed into her hole. Thankfully not having anyone's tentacle or cock or tentacle-cock or whatever in her pussy is a pretty rare occurrence. She tweaks her joints and tendons, making herself supernaturally flexible. On a whim she even adds small tentacles to the inside of her vagina, just for the fun of being able to grope things while they're penetrating her, and decides to keep them when she finds that they help a little with the side effect of the healing-fluid change, just in case she's ever separated from her tribe and can't keep a [Construct] dildo going.

And then, Kamryn starts learning about her new tribe's history.

Talance has grown up a lot, thanks to Kamryn. She can take on a passible human form, even, and often fucks around looking like a palette-swapped Kamryn, or when the mood strikes (either her or Kamryn or both at the same time), a genderswapped version of Kamryn.

One of the seducers, the newer ones, that Kamryn gave birth to herself, starts hanging around them. She doesn't have an anatomical name but when asked what she should be called she makes a sound like, "Uuloo." She's attentive and patient and spontaneously helpful whenever something she can help with comes up.

Then there's Eydow's protégé. A young gazer practicing with [Attack] and [Protect] and [Illusion], who is fascinated by lexical language and learns to speak out loud even better than the tentacle princesses. She names herself, "Yosaphen." and takes to challenging Kamryn to shield-magic contests.

The final member of their little group is an armor mimic that they meet when he crawls up out of the maw in the center of their  little Pinkzone, startling several of the tribe with his appearance.

He greets them with smug I-knew-I-could-find-you and a delighted-to-find-you also a somewhat ominous I-have-news-from-the-home.

The three princesses grab him and pepper him with questions. He tells them what he knows, and what he knows isn't good.

The part the tentacle princesses already know, but which is new to Kamryn is this:

Once there was a Lover who was beloved by all the Tentacled she met. She could speak their psychic language from day one, and was already an incredible fleshcrafter, and who knows what other powers she might have had. There is a stretch of time of which is a mystery to most, but the next known fact is that this Lover began collecting others of her own kind. This went unremarked and uncontested, for what business was it of anyone else's how she had her fun?

By the time it became clear to the princesses and queens what was going on, she had an army. She called herself the Red Queen, and she began a conquest that swept through the Red.

With all the powers of a proper Tentacle Queen magnified and empowered to insane heights by her ability to drain mana from the Red itself, this Red Queen spread like a cancer, devouring minds and enslaving bodies. She met little resistance, at first, for even in her extremity she seemed to only be overzealous-but-aligned with the ways of the Tentacled, filling the pits and tunnels of the Red with sweeping orgies and novel mutations that drew in interested crowds.

But where the Red Queen's influence takes hold, there is only one voice. One voice alone, where there should be thousands upon thousands. One voice alone, with all others subsumed to it, Tentacled and humanoid alike.

It was impossible for that to go unnoticed.

Various factions started to build psychic defenses and stage incursions into the Red Queen. To fight to slow her spread. To recover their lost kin. To contain the Red Queen and foil her conquest. But, the Red Queen did not make it easy.

The part that is new to even the tentacle princesses is this:

A great psychic barrier was erected across the Pink, not too far from the middle of the continent, but everything north of that barrier is lost. What's worse, the Red Queen has learned from her mistake, and has created a 'skin' of additional voices around her territory, masking the true nature of what she is from anyone who doesn't already know. She uses carefully bred living clothing to keep her decoy humanoids docile and controllable without taking their minds away from them entirely, while holding some unknown threat or power over the few Tentacled she's allowed to have their own thoughts.

For now, the barrier is holding, and a loose coalition of tentacle princesses have settled most of the displaced Tentacled and their Lovers in the south. But no one believes the barrier is a permanent solution, and they have no means to take the north back from the Red Queen.

And the Red Queen isn't idle. No one on their side can get close enough to find out what the Red Queen is building, but she's clearly building something. There is a Spire of flesh in the north, rising higher every day, and scouts recount tones of both joy and terror. It beats, they say. It beats like a heart.

That is the situation as it is known to Lygos.

Kamryn is still thirsty for stories of the outside world, and this one is kind of a big deal.

She bumps into Lygos, and he reflexively opens up, hot, slimy, purple tentacles flooding over her body. She's yanked off of the few other tentacles idly paying attention to her and sucked inside the armor in one smooth motion, the tentacles inside instantly spearing into and ravaging her holes with wild abandon, hurtling her into a chain of explosive orgasms.

     A tension seeps out of Lygos, like a man given water and shade after hours of parched work, as Kamryn's orgasmic ecstasy floods into his mind and being and bolsters him.

Kamryn quickly recovers the ability to think, between orgasms...

...well, sure, fine, being fucked like this is new, as all-encompassing as a very small tentacle pit but distinctly a different experience. And now she's closer to the conversation, and can still hear everything they're saying. Though it's hard to follow with how the princesses have lapsed out of lexical speech a bit as they confer.

The breakdown is this:

There is only one explanation the three princesses can think of, for what the Red Queen has accomplished. They demand that Lygos draw a map, showing them exactly where the Spire is. He tells them the coalition already thought of that, and yes. The new Spire is being grown directly over the Wound of the Lost Heart.

Legend tells that, long ago, a great and powerful heart was somehow cut from the Red itself and stolen away to the other end of the continent. No one knows what became of it, beyond the distant stories of a Consumed land.

"But if the Red Queen has conceived her power by insinuating herself into the Wound..."

It's an insane idea, but it occurs to all of them pretty much at the same time. The Lonely Heart. If it could somehow be retrieved, then maybe there was a way to use it to heal the Wound and expunge the Red Queen from the Red entirely!

An ancient legend, their only hope of overthrowing a tyrant and freeing their home? To pursue such a quest would be folly. And yet... what other hope do they have?

Of particular interest is this: The base of the princess coalition is far off in the southern reaches of the Pink. They, however, are smack in the middle of the northern Grey, almost five hundred miles away, five hundred miles closer to the Consumed. They, are not far off the middle of the continent, on an east-west line. If someone is going to journey to the Lonely Heart? It pretty much has to be them.

It took Lygos years to skirt the edges of the Red through the edges of Red Queen territory until he found their escape tunnel, and he can project a psychic impression that lets him pass for one of the Red Queen's Living Clothe slaver-mantles, at least if no one gets a look at him with eyes. Moving an entirely exploratory force through that gauntlet to get them into the continent? It would take decades, if they made it at all.

"Our only hope is the Lonely Heart, and the only ones that can be sent to seek that hope are ours," Taud concludes bleakly.

"I will go," Lygos instantly volunteers. "I will fight for our kin."

He goes to salute... and finds he can't? Why won't his arm move. He strains against some internal resistance, and it doesn't give, his arm won't move-

Kamryn hums a cheeky you-forgot-I-was-here-didn't-you and an I-can-do-this-all-day, and then, because this is a serious matter, an I-want-to-go-with-you-you'll-need-me. She's not sure it comes across entirely clear without the psychic component, but her jaw is wedged open by a massive purple tentacle dick that's squirming and thrusting deep into her throat and she can't exactly pronounce words.

She's not strong enough to overpower Lygos either, but what she can do is lock her muscles and refuse to bend, preventing him from moving his limbs. And she can keep doing it, because she doesn't get tired.

"You can talk?!?!?!?"

That isn't what he meant to say. He's met humans who can convey complex concepts before. He was just startled. Startled. Yes. Usually humans who are docile enough to grab and swallow without even paying attention to who or what he's swallowing aren't very communicative! It's totally reasonable to be startled!

After several long moments of struggle both against Kamryn's rigid body and his own embarrassment, Lygos spits her out so he can look at her and ask, "What was that about coming with us?"

"Do you know the first thing about surviving in the wilderness?" Kamryn asks rhetorically.

She knows they don't. And they know it too.

"I'm harder to kill than anyone else among us, and I know this land. Without me, the expedition will be eaten before they ever make it out of the Grey. Not every threat has enough tentacles to feel the authority of a princess."

A discussion ensues and a plan emerges. The princesses probably can't make the trip themselves anyway. Eydow might be able to manage on sheer power level, but Taud and Megk just aren't suited for survival off the Pink.

None of them brings up the possibility of not going. Kamryn was literally the second to volunteer, and she has no reason beyond loyalty to care. (Not true, Kamryn recognizes that the Red Queen is a threat to the world. But also yes, she's one of them now, their fight is her fight.)

If Kamryn is going, Talance wants to go with her, and she's the only one besides Kamryn who can look human. That will be useful. Oh, Uuloo wants to come along and look after them? Well, she supposes that's alright. Uuloo may be young but she's already adept at Dark-element casting with both [Attack] and [Protect], thanks to her natural affinity, and, well, bluntly, she's more disposable than a princess.

"Yosaphen, I'm sending you with them," Eydow declares.

The gazer gapes at her mentor. "What?! You want me to walk across half the world?"

"What, are you saying you're too weak? That these four don't need you?"

Yosaphen flailed in contraction before finally giving in, petulant. "Fine. I guess if you want something done right you should go along and do it yourself."

"That settles it, then."

Taud slithered forward. "Five companions... Seeking the key to our future. Yes, I see how this is the natural allotment. The connections between you. Lygos will complete you, and together... you give me hope. We shall count on you. All of you."

Talance, Kamryn, Uuloo, Lygos, and Yosaphen set out on their journey the very next day.